Brit Noir

Hell Is a City

It Always Rains on Sunday

Thanks to Film Forum I'm currently enjoying the opportunity to sample a few of the 40-some selections from a genre I had not previously seen grouped together, namely British film noir from the late 30s to early 60s. Noir is normally associated with postwar Hollywood directors (many of them European) such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Jacques Tourneur, Anthony Mann, Andre de Toth, Nicholas Ray, Joseph H. Lewis, Don Siegel, et al. The Film Forum series proves that, while overshadowed by the vast array of talents that American noir had to work with, the Brits were still managing to turn out an impressive body of dark, cynical films that remain largely unknown in the U.S.

Carol Reed's The Third Man and Odd Man Out are well-known and masterful examples of the genre, but a film like Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday deserves to be recognized as a major work, about a particularly dreary Sunday in the life of lonely housewife Googie Withers (a marvelous actress in a heartbreaking performance). A fugitive convict who was once her lover re-enters her life as she attempts to hide him in her home and facilitate his escape. A brief flashback, in which Withers is seen strikingly as a blonde, contrasts her youthful passion for bad boy John McCallum with her dreary, cramped existence on this particular rainy Sunday. Her dream of reliving the earlier affair is obviously doomed, but she goes to heroic efforts to guard the secret of the stranger in her bedroom. Hamer's complex, suspenseful screenplay is aided by Douglas Slocombe's expressionist lighting, particularly during the final chase in a train yard. The inevitability of the outcome is made all the more tragic by the genuine erotic longing and sense of lost opportunities between these two characters.
Stanley Baker is one of the major stars of Brit noir, appearing in three of the best films in the series, Val Guest's gritty Hell Is a City, Cy Endfield's politically-charged Hell Drivers and Joseph Losey's stylish The Criminal. I haven't seen the latter in a while and plan to catch it on August 30. Other upcoming highlights include tonight's October Man, Brighton Rock (Aug. 28-29), and Michael Powell's amazing color noir, Peeping Tom (Sept. 2-3).